Smart boys, Frogs, and Occupations

I'm so bad at keeping this thing updated. It's so easy to just quickly upload pictures to Facebook and forget about this blog. But I do plan on having this printed in book form eventually, so I am going to try to do better about posting with more than just pictures.

The boys are, as usual, growing like weeds. Josiah amazes us everyday with how smart he is. His current obsession is Lego Ninjago toys, that they have their own spinning battles and weapons and playing cards. He gets on their website and learns all the names of all the characters, picks favorites, makes me and Earl pick which one we want to be. He makes us "character cards" just like the Ninjago characters have, complete with our estimated "speed," "defense" and "attack-tion" (yes, he calls it attack-tion, instead of whatever it is supposed to be...offense, maybe?) ratings.

He learned to tie his shoes back in January. He loves learning sign language in school, and memorizing Bible verses for Sunday School.

We went to hiking this past weekend. That's one of Joey's favorite past times.

Joey told Tanner we were going "that way." And the rest of the hike, Tanner repeated, "dat way, dat way" and tried to show us where to go.

I can't believe they held hands! Tanner never lets Joey hold his hand. So sweet.

Di Di, remember that Diego backpack you got Joey when he was, like, 2? He used it for years, and it got packed away, and now it's found new life with Tanner.

Tanner loves frogs. He searches every book for a glimse of a frog. He loves them! I think we'll do a frog cake for his birthday next month, if he still loves them this much then. I thought it would end up being an Elmo or Curious George cake, but I think frogs have won out. He still loves watching Elmo and "ah-ah" but frogs seem to impress him the most. He loves babies, "bay-bay." I love how he calls his belly "bebby" instead of "beddy" like you would expect. He tells me "rocky bay-bay" to get me to rock him like a baby, but where he has his head dangling backwards looking upside down at everything. The way he learns words so fast is very impressive. He says bye to everything! I mean, everything! If he's getting out of the bath, he says bye to all this toys, individually, and to the bath, and to the water. If he's leaving the house, he says bye to whatever he was playing with or the dogs or whatever gets his attention as he's leaving. This morning, as he was chewing up the chocolate pieces from my Special K Chocolately Delight cereal, he even said bye to the chocolate as he ate it.

Joey likes to show us how fast he can run by doing circles around the main rooms of the house. So Tanner follows him, shouting "Fast, fast!" Both boys love playing outside, so we're excited about it getting spring weather now.

Another funny thing Tanner does is count: "doo, tee, doo, tee" (two, three, two, three) and holds up all five fingers and says "doo. doo frogs," or "doo. doo ah-ah's," no matter how many there actually are. The answer is always two to him.

Joey builds obstacles for the backyard.

Tanner plays in whatever wet or messy he can find.

Joey wanted me to take his picture as he posed like the Statue of Liberty.

Joey has still got his future planned out. He has a current list of occupations he wants to have (all at the same time).

When he and his daddy build a plane, (the plane is needed to hold all the stuff that they will use in these jobs), his jobs will be:

a ninja (then he had me mark this off because of the last item on the list)

archaeologist (he's changed it from paleontologist because he wants to discover all kinds of old things, not just dinosaurs)

garbage man

astronaut

work at a harbor

hiker

firefighter

world motorcycle racer

Medic in an ambulance

motorcycle tire fixer

dump truck driver

pilot of a plane that lands in the water

train engineer

forest fire fighter

ninja trainer

He wants his daddy to help him when he first starts these jobs, after college, since he probably won't know how to do them very good yet. He has also started thinking of jobs that I can do with them. I think I've been assigned 2 "stations" that I will be working at for them: the space station and the harbor station. And he's just told me now I'm going to work at the archaeologist station too, when he or his daddy is there to ride the "speedy jet boat" to the things I see for them. (?)

He also has big plans to build a jungle buggy with his daddy. They want it about the size of PawPaw's 4-wheeler, but he wants to customize it with parts he's going to find at junk yards and in the ground using his metal detector (Christmas present from Aunt Angie).

Both boys love the vacuum cleaner. This day it was used as a vehicle.

They love using glow sticks in the bath water for a glow in the dark bath.

Joey recycled his valentine's box to hold part of his rock collection.